It has happened before, and will happen again. You’ve spent your time aligning schedules and everyone can make it. You’ve been making sure everyone has the things they need to play, the dice, and the pens. Everyone has been well-fed or food has been otherwise arranged. All the details are taken care of... except you’ve spent so much time on all of that other stuff that you’ve neglected to plan for the session. Maybe you have a few ideas in your head, but no solid map or villain for the night. What the heck are you going to run as an adventure this evening?! Does all that sound familiar to you? You could always forgo the scheduled RPG session and just break out a board game. That may be fine every once in a while, but all the scheduling and everything else involved in gathering people (even virtually) is always going to be  next time. Before you break out that (non-roleplaying) other tabletop game, or even while you’re doing it, we might be able to take some inspiration from it for the

Undead are a common foe (and sometimes companion ) in many a game of Dungeons and Dragons . Sometimes the idiocy of memes make us wish we were dead. One Dungeons and Dragons -related meme floated through my  gaming group this week, and, as you might have guessed, it involved the undead. The meme goes a little something like this:  DM : You have been granted a wish. Cleric : I wish for the power to animate skeletons. DM : You know what? Okay.  [3 sessions later]  Cleric : I animate the bugbear’s skeleton. DM : They’re…they're not dead yet. Cleric : That wasn’t the wish.  [DM realizing what they’ve done, cue picture of shocked James Harden ] Of course, one could easily sub in S urprised Shaq , Shocked Pikachu , or one of a ny number of "surprised" memes . Or, maybe... you just... don’t ? Welcome to a little post series that I like to call "Never Say Dice Ruins Your TTRPG Memes." You may last recall this from our earlier post Divine Bovine . Could the situation pr

Electronic gaming has changed a lot over the years, and we at Never Say Dice have been lucky enough to experience these changes first-hand. As the scope and potential of games has grown, so too have distribution networks, allowing us to find and buy games that physical stores might not have thought worthy to stock. The shift to digital distribution has brought countless benefits (and, we must acknowledge, a fair number of drawbacks), but it’s completely removed one element that seemed an integral part of electronic gaming in our youths: the printed manual. This week, we thought we’d take a moment to appreciate this now-lost aspect of physical gaming media and how it helped define the gaming experience of its era. - B B : The shift away from manuals predates the rise of the digital storefront, of course. As storage media developed and games were able to integrate more and more of the material that had to be offloaded into a physical manual, packaging got smaller and smaller. In the cart

It can go by many names - the "Railroad DM," the "God GM", "DM Dictator," "GM Power Gaming…" The list goes on and on. It can also appear in many forms, some obvious by the above nicknames, such as railroading, metagaming, or dictatorship. You’ll recognize these traits in stories about TTRPG games time and again in various forums. We’re speaking of the issue of GM Overreach: the point at which the game's facilitator goes beyond their role as arbitrator and storyteller. Taking their powers beyond those the game had been designed with and beyond the assumed social contract with the players. How and why did this become an issue? Is there anything that can be done? Take a break from your tabletop and come explore the topic with Never Say Dice. Reaching There are a multitude of ways tabletop arbiters can overreach. Some of the worst, and unfortunately most common, are when the GM is "railroading" - forcing the story in the direction they

Like it or not, the electronic gaming landscape is dominated by long-running series, and has been since its early days . No matter when you read this, if you take a look at the current best–selling games, you’ll see a list that’s almost entirely sequels, off-shoots, reboots, or remakes of any of the above. This is something the medium inherited largely from the comic and cinematic industries it’s modeled after, but also reflects a certain risk-aversion as development costs skyrocket and mere success is insufficient to keep a studio afloat : name recognition is a safe bet. Publishers can assume some baseline of sales from dedicated fans who will always buy the latest installment of their favorite series. We at Never Say Dice can’t say that we’re totally immune to established gaming franchises , but for the most part we don’t stay on top of series with numerous installments like Assassin’s Creed , Final Fantasy , or Call of Duty . (Not that this will keep these games from filling out

You find them in all sorts of video games, even ones that aren’t RPGs. Some are special little Easter eggs, like including the original version of the game as an accessible dream sequenc e. Others are extra mechanics that get you through different sections or obstacles . A great many are in there just for fun , with a bonus if you’re going for 100% completionism . We’re talking about... the minigame! They break away from the regular monotony of gameplay and give you something fresh or reskinned, a new challenge to accomplish, or just a little bit of variety. Minigames bring all of that color to our video gaming worlds from the Wolfenstein nightmare sequence, to arcade machines and races in GTA, to everything else in between. The concept of a minigame can also bring those same kinds of advantages to our tabletop games. Current Content There are many different ways to incorporate a minigame into your tabletop sessions. One that you may already be incorporating are puzzle-style games. It